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Your efforts so far have placed you several standard deviations above the mean in terms of how coherent your theory is. If anyone said you should be able to solve it after ep4 they are straight up trolling you, all you're equipped to get after ep4 is a working theory/narrative - and most are much worse than yours.
No Wave fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 22:32
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Well, that's... actually encouraging to hear. That said I don't expect or need my current theories to be true in a complete sense, and I certainly don't want anyone to tell me, of course. But thank you for saying that. Time to keep reading I guess. edit: Oh, hello bishounen S. S. Van Dine, what are you doing here? Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 22:36
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Yeah, the thing is, on one hand you're nonplussed that everything seems to be worthless (it's all useless!), but on the other hand your biggest turnaround on your culprit hypothesis was prompted by a scene that isn't told in red and didn't outright say the thing you think it did, as are a number of your musings on the general state of things, so it's quite possible you're still in the acceptance phase that the worth of a given piece of information can't be directly correlated to its tone, so to speak. To be fair, your current dissatisfaction was a common complaint in the timespan when all this came out, but also for Higurashi, and it's a thing to keep in mind because it's not an accident. Many others have been where you are and that's part of the flavor. Chev fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 00:53
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Chev posted:Yeah, the thing is, on one hand you're nonplussed that everything seems to be worthless (it's all useless!), but on the other hand your biggest turnaround on your culprit hypothesis was prompted by a scene that isn't told in red and didn't outright say the thing you think it did, as are a number of your musings on the general state of things, so it's quite possible you're still in the acceptance phase that the worth of a given piece of information can't be directly correlated to its tone, so to speak. So as a general comment on that, it's been fairly clear for a while that the story has different goals in mind for different scenes. This is especially true for explicitly magical scenes where you can immediately discard the idea that the up-front physical events taking place in the scene are real. That can never be the point of a scene like that. But of course even mundane scenes can have clues that aren't obvious from a shallow reading of the events. That's the case in every mystery fiction ever written. The clue can be hidden in conversation, or just in the circumstances of the scene playing out, or in some other way. That is fair game. But in the end, I still have to formulate a solution that is consistent with the facts on all levels, including physically. Poirot would not be able to get away with saying "mes amis, the killer is the widower with the strong and clear motive - never mind that he was twenty miles away at the time of the murder and had no accomplices". When the story is now telling me simultaneously that anything I've been shown can arbitrarily (so far as I'm equipped) be a lie, no matter if it's mundane or magical, witnessed by the detective or not; and also that I should really be able to put together a verifiable solution by now, I'm kind of at a loss to how that's fair. To borrow an analogy from the game, I feel like I'm being served soup with chopsticks and then sneered at because I'm unable to eat anything without tipping the bowl. But, well, I've been operating up to now on the assumption that episode 4 was all I needed and that having to read 5 and 6 ahead of figuring everything out was a failure on my part, but if that's not the case then, I don't know. I'm going to read on. I've barely dipped my toe into episode 7. (Remind yourself of Knox's original article - he ends it with a paragraph of pointing out the precise points in the following works where the reader ought be able to turn away from the page if he wants to solve the mystery for himself.) Oh, and I never read Higurashi - my knowledge of it comes from the anime, and at the time I wasn't making any attempts to solve it ahead of time. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 09:05
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:But Umineko has now proven that even the viewpoint of the detective is fraudulent, so there is no framework other than the red text in which problems with any theory can appear. I would suggest you look very carefully at how that scene is presented before saying that.
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Sep 12, 2020 10:31
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Cyouni posted:I would suggest you look very carefully at how that scene is presented before saying that. Are you suggesting that because technically the scene is described by Battler, who is not the detective, that despite Erika's presence this is not a scene in which the detective proclamation holds? That would be pretty lame if that's the case, because there are lots of scenes where the narrator isn't clearly stated and the writing vacillates wildly between third and first person, and omniscient narration. (I wonder to what extent this is a translation artifact.)
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Sep 12, 2020 10:44
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:But, well, I've been operating up to now on the assumption that episode 4 was all I needed and that having to read 5 and 6 ahead of figuring everything out was a failure on my part Same deal here. Episode 1 to 4 was enough to formulate a fully educated hypothesis, but it's not the full story. When people did formulate what would turn out to be the truth, certainly many dismissed it as a convoluted reach. But the elements have been foreshadowed. A good example is the matter of the mansion: certainly everything points to it having been destroyed and having rendered the scene and bodies unusable. This becomes obvious when episode 4 dances around it, but the hints are planted much earlier and you can formulate the general idea by the end of episode 2, even though you can't really say "the mansion was destroyed by such means". It hinges on the reader getting the whole magic metaphor narration thing pretty fast, and for that matter also that there may be a framing story extending past the final night, before episode 3 introduces grown up Ange. And in fact it's something that's outright told to you at the end of episode 1's regular story, before the tea party even, but oh so easily forgotten. That being said, I feel there are definitely unfair bits in Umineko and some written in bad faith. But at the same time that's a huge part of why it's super interesting and people are still having slapfights about it. As for Higurashi, well. Umineko exists because of Higurashi, and in relation to Higurashi. It exists because people felt the Higurashi VN was at times unfair or written in bad faith, that maybe it didn't count as a mystery (the anime's a full miss but that's another story entirely), but also because people wanted more Higurashi. It's fine to not have read Higurashi (although there's huge added value, also it's awesome), only the general idea that the controversy exists is needed. Hyper Crab Tank posted:a failure on my part Chev fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 11:11
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Chev posted:But it leaves the culprit's motivation entirely unknown and relies on a mechanism that you know must exist by virtue of being needed but hasn't been described. I admit my theory has been completely devoid of motive up to this point... what little I've seen of episode 7 (just up to the animated intro cutscene) seems to imply we're going to be exploring that next. It's been a long time since I read And Then There Were None, but isn't the conclusion in that story basically that the murderer just did it for kicks, knowing that he was dying anyway and the victims also deserved to die? I get what you're saying though. If you were to suggest the correct answer to that story before the reveal there would be decent arguments that it couldn't be true. As for the mansion, I think the first point I was suspicious of that was at the end of episode 1, when Maria's jawbone is described as the only thing they could find to verify anything. It made me think fire, because dental records can be used to identify burnt corpses and 1986 is right on the border of being too early for DNA evidence to be a thing yet. I don't know when Japan would've first started using it, but it would've been cutting-edge in the mid-80s in the West. Assuming the mansion was destroyed, it would presumably be intentional, and a fire ticks those boxes as well as explaining why Beatrice could kill Battler despite him being alone on the island. I suppose some kind of explosion would produce the same effect - perhaps something in the boiler room, or As for framing narratives, I'm still not entirely over the idea that the only person that truly exists is Ange, and everything else is her trying to understand the past through alternative explanations. Chev posted:How can it be a failure? You haven't been asked for your answer yet. Is that not the upshot of the scene with Featherine dressing down Ange for disbelieving that an answer can be found? I took that scene as Ryukishi07 literally stepping up via self-insert and saying "you fucks, stop whining about my story and solve it already, the answer is out there." But more than that, I guess besides what I was told, I interpreted "Answer Arcs" as that episodes 5-8 were going to slowly tell me the outright answers to mysteries already presented, like a protracted end scene where Poirot lays out all the details of the murder that I as a reader could have already reached before coming this far. That the gap between 4 and 5 is Knox's caesura where all has been revealed before and what comes after is spoiling the bloom.
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Sep 12, 2020 11:37
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:I admit my theory has been completely devoid of motive up to this point Hyper Crab Tank posted:It's been a long time since I read And Then There Were None, but isn't the conclusion in that story basically that... Hyper Crab Tank posted:I guess besides what I was told, I interpreted "Answer Arcs" as that episodes 5-8 were going to slowly tell me the outright answers to mysteries already presented, like a protracted end scene where Poirot lays out all the details of the murder that I as a reader could have already reached before coming this far. That the gap between 4 and 5 is Knox's caesura where all has been revealed before and what comes after is spoiling the bloom. What's more, Higurashi's answers, just like Umineko's not-exactly-answers, merely transformed the question. Like, on one hand you had individual mysteries, but you also had the bigger mystery looming over them. After Higurashi's 4th episode you could formulate answers to the mysteries and some of them were really crazy. And then as the answers were confirmed each individual mystery solved only added more to the big one, and once that one was answered you knew who the magician was, why they did it but, right until the final episode, not what led them to chose to become a magician. And even once you knew that, the question on your mind would be "but how does it end?", deeply tied with "what is it trying to say?". Chev fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 13:09
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Higurashi famously had someone on a 2002 07th Expansion's message board or whatever after Onikakushi basically more or less guess the entire story. Obviously more of a coincidence than anything else but it was funny to think about. It's worth keeping in mind that people were "meant" to have like 6+ months in between chapters to digest, compare, and theorize these stories.Hyper Crab Tank posted:Are you suggesting that because technically the scene is described by Battler, who is not the detective, that despite Erika's presence this is not a scene in which the detective proclamation holds? That would be pretty lame if that's the case, because there are lots of scenes where the narrator isn't clearly stated and the writing vacillates wildly between third and first person, and omniscient narration. (I wonder to what extent this is a translation artifact.) Nate RFB fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 13:52
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I finished Umineko chapter 2, and I'm unsure if I wanna continue. I feel like I see what the game is trying to do: challenging me to solve these locked room mysteries without resorting to "a witch did it", and the whole Beatrice/Battler frame narrative is a way to give me, the reader, extra information in the form of the red text. But my god is it slow! Every time I really get into it in a Beatrice/Battler battle of wits and get hyped, there then proceeds to be hours upon hours of repetition of the same lines. How many times does Maria giggle and say Beatrice "exists"? How many times do I need to hear Beatrice yell "Baaaaaaatleeeeeeeeeeeeer"? How many times do I need to hear the servants say the line "I'm furniture"? I like a lot of what this story is doing, and the more personal stories in part 2 (Shannon and Kanon's stories especially) were more interesting than the chapter 1 personal side stories, but man. It feels like this game BADLY needs an editor.
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Sep 12, 2020 17:36
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Yeah, that's the number one issue I have with Umineko as well.
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Sep 12, 2020 17:40
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Don't be afraid to fast-forward. Press ctrl and don't let go. If you think you've gotten the gist of a scene, you most likely have, so fast-forward until the next scene transition or w/e. Yes, there is a ton of set-up for dramatic irony you might miss, but you won't appreciate it right now anyway.
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Sep 12, 2020 18:17
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if you are coming to the point where your skipping sections of a story, just don't read the story, that is perfectly acceptable. i love umineko a lot but i would not fault anyone from quitting because god, the repetition. ciconia at least seems like it is getting better about that though it still has the WALLS OF PEACE over and over again lol
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Sep 12, 2020 18:52
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Okay what the hell, I've read literally like a few scenes after the intro to Umineko episode 7 and now there's another child that showed up, and not only is it an extremely androgynous person that looks like a mix between Shannon and Kanon (and with the same brooch around the neck), the name ends with "on". I can only assume we're now looking at a Fragment in which Natsuhi didn't yeet the child down a cliff the instant an opportunity presented itself. Or, well, not even a Fragment, this is some kind of meta-view, but you get what I mean. edit: And Shannon's little freak-out when Will tries to get her and Kanon in the same room at the same time seems like the game continuing to hammer down the same point. Geez. edit 2: I'm typing this as I go along because I feel like the game is just telling me what happened now and I worry if I don't write now, I won't be able to speculate later. Torpedoes? It occurs to me now that the mansion is not destroyed in a fire so much as the detonation of one of these suckers, left over from the war. That would explain the comments at the end of episode 1 about the jaw being removed from the body. Sorry for such a paucity of text at such an early point of the episode, I'm just kind of flabbergasted, I guess. Is Ryukishi07 trolling me? He's got to be, right? As for the repetitiveness... well, I had exactly the same view of it early on. So far the chapters have varied a lot on this point. Episode 4 had some of the most emotionally striking scenes in the story so far, but also some of the longest, most exhausting to read segments that seemed to be going nowhere fast. Other chapters have kept a relatively brisk pace and I haven't felt like I had to skip or fast-forward anything at all. Let it be said in the end that among all the things I do like about this VN - and for the record, though I may gripe and have misgivings, I do very much like it - Ryukishi07's prose (as opposed to the ideas expressed) has not been a highlight. Perhaps there are hidden layers of meaning in the repetitiveness that I can't see, but... well. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 19:02
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Nah, it just seems to be a thing, at least in japanese VNs and light novels, possibly other written stuff too, but it ties into the next point: good translators will pare it down or get rid of it or give it a better rythm, whatever, but Umineko's translation, while not bad, is not the most shining localization work around, and I think mangagamer's version is in fact largely adapted from the preexisting fan translation?
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Sep 12, 2020 19:45
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I feel like the concept of a storyteller "trolling" its audience has lost all meaning to me.
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Sep 12, 2020 20:38
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You lack love!
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Sep 12, 2020 20:41
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Hmm. Well, let me put it this way. For a game that has been so clearly obtuse on details - as any good mystery should - it's now laying things on so thick that I'm worried the author is only doing it so that he can pull the rug out from under my feet at the last moment. I've been using the word "judo-toss" a few times now; to me, that brings to mind an attacker goaded forward, encouraged by what appears to be an easy victory, when in reality he's moments away from having all that strength turned against him. Edit: I'm not going to sit and read until 2 am again, but I've read a little bit further into episode 7 of Umineko. Startlingly, many of my hypotheses are either validated by what I'm being told now, or at least compatible with it. If everything holds, then you could summarize what I'm seeing so far as: - Original Beatrice did indeed exist as I hypothesized, could plausibly have had a child and died in childbirth; Kinzo raised this child in Kuwadorian believing her to still contain the spirit of the woman he loved. - Whether the child that was thrown off a cliff is Beatrice the Second's daughter in turn or not is still up in the air. The timeline matches, but she would've had to given birth before dying (I think even child Rosa would notice if she was at the peak of pregnancy at the time) and there is little to indicate that right now. Also, there's a severe lack of potential fathers that don't involve incest of some sort. The only ones that are remotely plausible are Genji and Nanjo, and I would suspect the former before the latter. - Speaking of which, Genji has made repeated references to a life-long debt he owed Kinzo, implied to be for something Kinzo did for Genji a long time ago. We still don't know what that is, but everything else is related to Beatrice so this could be too. - Either way, the cliff child is Lion. Given the androgynous appearance and the way the story is written so no one ever uses any pronouns when referring to Lion, the story is deliberately hiding that person's gender from us. I figure this must've been tough on the translators, given Japanese's tendency to get by without using pronouns more easily than English does. Either way, Kinzo believes Lion is the current reincarnation of Beatrice and is therefore more than happy to hand over the successorship. - Shannon freaked out when Wright tried to get her to summon Kanon. This is... spookily consistent with my hypothesis. Of course, she could have done so, but it would've revealed the truth in an instant. - Speaking of, as was mentioned, this world is stitched together from different fragments. This Shannon/Kanon are from a fragment like the ones we know, everyone else is... they might not all be from the same fragments, honestly, but at least some are different from what we've seen. Perhaps that also explains why Kinzo is still alive: in fragments where Lion lived, he did not go quite as crazy and didn't drink quite as much alcohol, keeping him alive and kicking for longer. Also, in those worlds, Shannon and Kanon do not exist, as they are the counterparts of Lion, which is why they don't recognize each other. - Rudolf has been trying to tell Battler something about the circumstances of his birth for quite some time, but has always failed. Up to now, I've believed the truth is simply that he was Kyrie's child in secret, and it was Asumu's child that died, and a switch was made for political reasons. This is supported by him and Ange being almost identical in appearance. However, a more sinister explanation might be that Kinzo snatched one of the children to become Beatrice the Third (this theory is compatible with the previous one, as well - both can be true). In that situation, Battler isn't merely someone Beatrice the Third fell in love with - he's her half-brother. This means Battler's age is slightly wonky too, but not as much as you would think. However, this theory has one big flaw: why in the world would Kinzo see a need to abduct a child from one of his children only to hand it over to another of his children? There is nothing in that scenario that would stop Rudolf and Asumu from raising the child and him simply designating the child the heir. It would be unorthodox, yes, but since when is that out of character for Kinzo? - Another possibility is that the Fukuin House story is true - Beatrice the Second did not have a child, but there was a... compatible child at Fukuin House. That's kind of arbitrary, but I guess not out of the question. I'm not inclined to believe it. - Given the mention of massive torpedoes, I can't help but wonder if the mansion didn't so much perish in a fire as in an explosion. The text does say no Kaiten torpedoes were ever shipped to Rokkenjima, but perhaps something similar was scavenged from the remains of the Italian submarine, or there's simply army surplus explosive material lying around in the tunnels. Indeed, what destroys the mansion could be a self-destruct mechanism built by the army in the 40s, to be activated in case the Americans arrived. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 20:45
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New day, new post. Actually, I'm in the middle of reading episode 7, and, okay. Wow. Hold up, pause. Entirely besides this game confirming almost everything I've been guessing so far - summary later, I guess - they touched on the epitaph. The whole freshwater river thing and connecting it to railway stations and whatever I would never have figured out in a million years, even if I knew what Kinzo's hometown was. I was certain it was all a word game. So for me, the miracle never happen. But the game just went through a little bit of it and showed the word "Qilian" on screen and I kinda had to pause, because... okay. So, I've been thinking for a long time now that that stupid chapel door has to have something to do with the puzzle. And between everything else we've been told about it now... that door said something like "this door will open on the odds of one in a quadrillion", right? Pretty miraculous odds. Exactly the kind of odds Kinzo would've been looking for. But this is a freaking word puzzle in the end, isn't it? The siblings were saying it could be something about removing letters from words, right? Quadrillion. What a weirdly specific word, and a word with 11 letters, by the way, that was also brought up, wasn't it? Offer up the six as sacrifices. Battler and Erika seemed to be fiddling with some kind of mechanism in the end, to unlock the path to the gold. I don't know what this could be exactly, but a straightforward idea is the writing on the door itself; what if the letters are buttons that can be pushed or pulled (抉る means like, to gouge or hollow out)? Whether that means the right order is L, O, R, D, U or U, D, R, O, L is not super clear to me but it's not like you couldn't try both. Since nothing obvious happened when Battler and Erika solved it, I'm guessing pushing or pulling those letters in the right order opens the hidden tunnel to Kuwadorian/the military base, which is not immediately adjacent to the chapel, which explains why they had to walk a bit to find it. I don't know what the solution to that line that bothered everyone before, with the odd 黄金の郷 wording, was all about yet. I guess I'm about to find out. I'm not fond of the geographical component to the epitaph, I have to say, especially in the context of challenging the reader of the VN to figure it out with nothing to go on to figure out Kinzo's hometown other than a brief reference to nuts (and, much later, that he speaks Chinese), but... once that part got over with, the rest makes sense. And I guess in the end it's not important to figuring out the deeper mysteries of what happened on this day - all that matters is realizing someone solved it much earlier than Eva or Battler ever did. Okay, sorry, had to write that down before I read on. Continuing. edit: What the hell is that "once and for the last time" clue supposed to be? What the hell. I guess it makes more sense in Japanese - my Japanese is not good enough to spot that. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 16:03
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Okay I guess I'll triple-post like some kinda jerk. Umineko episode 7, over, tea parties included. I don't really know what to add at this point. There's very little to speculate about. That episode dumped so much information on the reader and squared away almost every open question, to the extent that I don't know where the last episode is going to go from here, and all I can do now is to regurgitate what the game has already said plainly - assuming it's too late in the game to expect a complete reversal now. That said, it was also one of the better paced episodes so far, despite being chock full of stuff. I guess all I can do at this point is wonder to myself about a few things that haven't been explicitly answered yet. - Who is Battler's real mother? I'm still thinking Kyrie. - We never see Battler die in the "canonical" fragment. It's possible he is still alive. - What is the debt Genji owed Kinzo? I think this isn't important to the story, but it was mentioned more than once so I can't forget it. - Does Ange survive being attacked not just by goons, but apparently by Amakusa as well, in 1998? - Did Clair (I'm going to use that name to disambiguate from Lion, the child that was not thrown off a cliff) appear as Kanon physically, or merely as yet another imagined friend, like Virgilia, Ronove, the Stakes etc.? I'm thinking that for the relationship with Jessica to proceed in the fashion it did, and for some of Battler's viewpoint scenes, that has to be the case. Then, Genji/Kumasawa must've known more than they've let on, even at this stage of the story. - I guess I haven't solved episode 5 yet, but I think my solutions for 1-4 hold water. There was implicit confirmation of at least some of it when Will was cutting down scenarios (e.g. "the first and the last room overlapping" suggests that my theory that the same person appeared first as Shannon and last as Kanon is correct). - For all that this explicitly spells out the path that led Clair to this moment, it's not clear (ha) to me what the final step connecting "Battler has returned and torn up old wounds at exactly the worst time, too late to stop me from seeking love elsewhere and too early for that love to fully bloom and let me move on" and "I guess the only reasonable thing to do now is randomly either murder everyone else and explode an entire island, or... don't do that". That step is a little too big. I get that Battler's return would cause problems and lashing out, but I don't get why it would go all the way up to mass murder and explosions. Yeah, I don't know what to add at this point, really. Am I missing anything? Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 20:17
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Yeah, I don't know what to add at this point, really. Am I missing anything? Just strap in for episode 8 and enjoy 
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Sep 13, 2020 20:43
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:- For all that this explicitly spells out the path that led Clair to this moment, it's not clear (ha) to me what the final step connecting "Battler has returned and torn up old wounds at exactly the worst time, too late to stop me from seeking love elsewhere and too early for that love to fully bloom and let me move on" and "I guess the only reasonable thing to do now is randomly either murder everyone else and explode an entire island, or... don't do that". That step is a little too big. I get that Battler's return would cause problems and lashing out, but I don't get why it would go all the way up to mass murder and explosions. If you do need it spelled out more explicitly, the manga version of EP8 does have three chapters called "Confessions of the golden witch" that turn the subtext into just straight up text. There's also a few extra TIPs stories that can be found in Hane/Tsubasa/Saku (not available on the Steam release, though they're translated in the 07th-mod patch) that provide a bit more as well. But at the end of the day, by completing EP7, you have seen the "heart" of the matter, it's laid it more or less all out there for you to judge.
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Sep 13, 2020 20:56
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Nate RFB posted:If you do need it spelled out more explicitly [...] If by that you mean that the child suffered some kind of injury that... shall we say, would interfere with the typical sexual development of a person, there's been so much subtext that it's practically text anyway. The main reason I'm attributing that to the fall is that there was a brief but angry line questioning why Nanjo wouldn't simply let Yasu die if surviving meant living with that injury, by the way. The need for the duel in episode 6 is crystal clear (even before episode 7 I think I got it mostly right), I just think the story hasn't really explained the step from there to mass murder. Was the idea that if enough of his family was murdered he would be spurred to solve the case and love Shannon again? That the one in a quadrillion chance would happen and someone would solve the epitaph? But then what? Even before the old-fashioned Ushiromiya murdergreed kicks in, there doesn't seem to be a path from that scenario to one where she gets together with Battler either. I understand the desperation and mess of emotions, I don't understand the route they took. Even people behaving emotionally and irrationally have some kind of goal that makes sense to them.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:11
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Even before the old-fashioned Ushiromiya murdergreed kicks in, there doesn't seem to be a path from that scenario to one where she gets together with Battler either. . Also to be clear (and this is actually a pretty important point for the story!) it's Beatrice who wants to be with Battler. It's "impossible" for Shannon to love Battler anymore and that is actually part of the problem that creates their impossible situation. Finally, remember that the explosion (which is low key actually one of the biggest reveals of EP7, it's just overshadowed by Yasu's story) erased all evidence... we don't actually know whether there was a murder spree or whether Battler was able to solve the riddle or not. The cat box was sealed.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:27
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Man now that this silly zoomer (you are a zoomer by my definition of "started Umineko like within the last month instead of last year August") has surpassed me I decided to get back into it partway through chapter 7. I'll show this silly zoomer that the proper way to live blog is to give your individual thoughts with tiny posts that get heavily edited as you crawl through the VN at snai lspeed rather than giant effortposts. Chapter 7 spoilers: Hmm. Interesting that Yasu only got voice acting on their decision to become a witch. Their voice sounds feminine to me, but with Japanese stuff it still doesn't give away a prescribed sex. Regardless, I wonder if this is supposed to signify that this is when Yasu really became confident in themselves and became to have an identity? Edit 1: Ah, given the following discussion with Gap/Beatrice, it seems like the voice is because this is when Yasu decided to separate themself from "Shannon". Edit 2: Hmm, I've only started learning Japanese since I started Umineko. Does Beatrice normally refer to herself as 我々? I think I heard Yasu say that just now, which is odd. Obviously 我 is old sounding, but that makes sense for Beatrice. Its odd since 我々 is "we" and one would think that she would use 我 rather than 我々. Edit 3: I think I just misheard 我は. Okay, moving on. MegaZeroX fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 21:56
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Nate RFB posted:Why not? We see more or less an exact path for it laid out from [...] I think there's a bit of a difference between pursuing what at least for the moment seems like a normal and relatively healthy romance with boy (George) and expecting that to work out on one hand, and on the other expecting a similar result from murdering someone's entire family. Nate RFB posted:Also to be clear (and this is actually a pretty important point for the story!) [...] Yes, I'm being a bit sloppy. Let me spell it out the way I see it, just so there's no confusion about my interpretation of what has happened. (HOLY poo poo MEGASPOILERS for Umineko below) A child is born to Beatrice the Second and Kinzo; soon thereafter, Beatrice dies. Kinzo attempts to integrate the child into his family by giving it to Natsuhi, who rejects the child and throws it off a cliff. Genji and Nanjo save the child's life and hide it at Fukuin House, where the child is named... presumably Yasuda Sayo. With the injuries, Yasuda grows up frail and unassertive, and with a lot of understandable body issues. At age nine, Genji brings her (I'm just going to use that pronoun from now for expedience, issues notwithstanding) to Rokkenjima as a servant. She is forgetful and does a lot of things wrong, but Kumasawa teaches her tricks to compensate as well as the legend of the witch, itself a conflation of the rumors about Kinzo's mistress and the evil spirits that drown people. At this time, she leans on the comfort of "Shannon", her vision of what the perfect servant should be like. Sayo reimagines her forgetfulness as the witch, Beatrice, playing tricks on her and creates the vision of her. She does not know what the original Beatrice looked like, so her vision of a witch is of a woman with blonde, curled hair and a weird red dress. Over time, as she gets better at dealing with her flaws, she begins to imagine the witch as her friend rather than a foe. When one day she decides to teach the younger servants a lesson in forgetfulness by stealing a key behind their back, she begins to feel like a witch herself and rewrites her inner imaginary universe: she is the witch Beatrice, now imagined as a woman dressed all in white, and the former Beatrice is left nameless for now. At this point there is some kind of... fracturing going on in her personality, but the upshot is that Shannon, the perfect servant, becomes the dominant personality while Beatrice possibly peeks out now and then as someone who pulls tricks on other servants and things like that. Shannon grows and becomes friends with the cousins, Battler in particular, over their shared interest in mystery novels; and as Beatrice with Maria, bonding over her interest in the occult. This is when Beatrice's inner universe of characters blooms more fully. The red-dressed Beatrice is renamed Gaap, the butler-like servant formed from a mental image she based on Genji is named Ronove, and so on, all names taken from Maria's books. The Stakes, some pseudo-occult items Kinzo once bought, are imbued with the personalities of former fellow servants from Fukuin House. Maria's porcelain rabbits become the Chiester Sisters - at this point a marching band, the association with rifles presumably comes later. Battler and Shannon - let's not forget they are merely 12/13 at this time - grow somewhat close, and both start feeling the early stirrings of adolescent love for each other, and Battler makes some comments that, critically, he doesn't imbue with the same level of meaning that Shannon, in her hunger to be accepted, does. Then, Battler disappears. Heartbroken, embittered, Shannon pushes her feelings for Battler onto the Beatrice personality, whose mental image shifts to be more in line with the blonde and attractive type of woman Battler said he liked. Kanon is born at this time, too, as a younger brother for Shannon to engage with - oddly, we don't really explore Kanon's role all that much, but that's what happens. When Kinzo hangs the portrait of Beatrice in the hall, her mental image shifts again. If that's Beatrice, and she is Beatrice, then that's what she looks like. At this point it's kind of hard to follow which personality is asserting itself at what time, but at any rate she solves the epitaph, and learns of her true lineage from Genji and Nanjo. Kinzo has his moment of... I'm not sure I really want to call it absolution, but he dies and she is now the master of the mansion. She swears off any desire to actually take over the family, or the money. It's not entirely clear at what point in the timeline it happens, but Shannon, no longer waiting for Battler to return, begins her relationship with George while Kanon yearns for Jessica in silence. If all had continued from here, we would have only one primary problem to deal with: Shannon and Kanon cannot both be with the one they love. One must die. (Add to this the problem that George has been talking about wanting children, and we have to assume poor Shannon can't; we also have the problem that she's technically his... aunt?) But then Battler returns to Rokkenjima, and what was once a problem between two personalities has become a problem between three. If he had returned sooner, Shannon could perhaps have been with him. If he had returned later, she would've been fully with George. Worse yet, Battler has forgotten the promise he made, forgotten Shannon. Rejected her. Something goes horribly wrong in her mind, Beatrice - the personality saddled with the unrequited love for Battler - reasserts herself, and the tragedy of Rokkenjima ensues. Does that sound about right? Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 22:02
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To clarify at least one important point, Battler solving the epitaph and understanding both that Beatrice exists and why she came to be in the first place would mean that no one would die (see how she does not resist when the adults solve it in the "what-if" in EP7). This is made explicit in some of the aforementioned Tsubasa/Hane/Saku materials I alluded to before.
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Sep 13, 2020 23:27
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You should refrain from leaning into the extra materiasl before Hyper Crab Tank's gone through all eight chapters. They were, after all, released after the final episode (well, as a bonus to the final episode for Tsubasa) and meant to be read afterwards.
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Sep 13, 2020 23:46
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I think Saku is a whole separate conversation honestly (it really is just a postgame sidestory, same sort of vein as Saikoroshi), but I personally feel most of the stories collected in at least Tsubasa work better if you read them along as you go because they were released alongside many chapters. The problem is that's very hard to decipher which ones to read when since now they're just in one big collection.
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Sep 13, 2020 23:52
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:But then Battler returns to Rokkenjima, and what was once a problem between two personalities has become a problem between three. If he had returned sooner, Shannon could perhaps have been with him. If he had returned later, she would've been fully with George. Worse yet, Battler has forgotten the promise he made, forgotten Shannon. Rejected her. Something goes horribly wrong in her mind, Beatrice - the personality saddled with the unrequited love for Battler - reasserts herself, and the tragedy of Rokkenjima ensues. You were remarkably on-point for pretty much everything after finishing episode 6. That said, the motive has a lot more to it and is really the ultimate puzzle to Umineko. Episode 7 gives you the life story of the culprit but skips over their actual motive for the crime. Episode 8 doesn't actually really give you anything more on that topic. I'll try and give you a hint before you look up the answer that appears in the manga. The big missing scene is something that happens after the scene where Kinzo dies after apologising. Yasu learns the following: - they have a body that is "incapable of love" - the three people they're in love with are all second degree blood relatives And of course, they were also already aware that since they were only one person they wouldn't be able to reciprocate all three romances anyway. With all this in mind (as well as what you know is actually happening in reality), try rereading the scene in episode 2 where Beatrice kills Shannon and George.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:40
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I disagree that the manga is needed, like, at all. All it does is reiterate things the VN already says, only without the subtlety.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:56
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It's not "necessary" exactly, but (episode 8ish?) the fact that it exists and is something you can choose to read or not read is incredibly appropriate.
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Sep 14, 2020 01:05
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Are you suggesting that because technically the scene is described by Battler, who is not the detective, that despite Erika's presence this is not a scene in which the detective proclamation holds? That would be pretty lame if that's the case, because there are lots of scenes where the narrator isn't clearly stated and the writing vacillates wildly between third and first person, and omniscient narration. (I wonder to what extent this is a translation artifact.) Well, there's a few parts here: Yes, it's described by Battler, and yes, the detective proclamation is still valid, but it does not apply to him. That said, if you want a bigger hint: Look carefully at where Shannon is compared to Erika, and what interactions she has with everyone else. Yes, it's a pretty mean trick. Hyper Crab Tank posted:I think there's a bit of a difference between pursuing what at least for the moment seems like a normal and relatively healthy romance with boy (George) and expecting that to work out on one hand, and on the other expecting a similar result from murdering someone's entire family. You might want to consider "incapable of love" + George's desires to have children. The end of episode 2 is probably worth checking out again, as noted. Cyouni fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 06:30
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Along with what others said Hyper Crab, I’m not sure if you’re reading it as straight multiple personalities or alters or whatever, and you can, but I think imaginary constructs of Yasu’s potential lives/futures is a better way to look at it. Like seeing the duel as a mental struggle with gender issues and what Yasu can get away with and what she can live with after the extremely hosed up circumstances of her birth & life to that point. Trying out different things in her relationships and falling on this as her final conclusion if that makes sense.
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Sep 14, 2020 08:01
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I'm writing this in the morning just before work, so I don't have time to re-read right now, but I'll do that tonight. I'll make a few comments right away though.Yakiniku Teishoku posted:Along with what others said Hyper Crab, I’m not sure if you’re reading it as straight multiple personalities or alters or whatever, and you can, but I think imaginary constructs of Yasu’s potential lives/futures is a better way to look at it. Yes, I think that's right. This does not strike me as a disassociative personality thing, more like an extension of the imaginary friend concepts to Sayo herself. Irony Be My Shield posted:incapable of love etc. So the straightforward reading, as I mentioned above, is that the child sustained an injury in the fall that interfered with normal sexual development. Regardless of the exact details (male, female...), I think we can conclude that she's incapable of having children, and probably didn't have a normal puberty. So when George says he wants children, that's got to immediately set her rejection alarm off, as if it wasn't bad enough that they're blood related. The timeline is a little bit fuzzy for me post-Kinzo's death, but she would've had to know about all these problems for something like a year before the final conference, and still pursued George with vigor knowing all these problems existed. I guess that was the hope that a miracle could occur, that at least one of the three might have a chance of being accepted despite all the problems. Kanon, then, is probably a representation of Sayo wondering what life could be like as a boy, and wondering if that may be the path to acceptance. Battler does solve the epitaph (with the help of Erika) in episode 5, and yet murders happen. However, it's been mentioned many times now that episode 5 was a game without love or honor, so it's entirely plausible that Sayo had nothing to do with the killings, or this is a fragment in which she has no hope at all and just straight up plans to murder everyone. We know the Ushiromiyas are more than capable of taking care of it themselves as well. To that end, it seems to me that a game that gives Beatrice the ending she wanted is one in which Battler solves the epitaph alone, does not reveal the gold to the others (or at least not in a way that sparks them to kill each other), gives Beatrice the understanding she needs and remembers his sin, and Beatrice is laid to rest peacefully before everything starts going wrong. Whether Shannon and George will be together or Kanon and Jessica after that is a separate issue that doesn't really require Battler's involvement. And now, a joke to whiplash the mood: I've been playing two games recently. One is a game about nobles, succession crises, greed, intrigue, murder and incest. The other is Crusader Kings III! edit: And a small, insignificant note: Wow, poor Gohda, huh. At first he seemed like kind of a self-serving prick, but in the end, is he the only one on the island with no responsibility for what happened and no significant personal problems? Poor man just wanted to cook good food for people and be acknowledged for it. Truly he is the only pure one in this drama. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 08:21
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With Umineko's Episode 7, The journey you take through Yasu's life is meant not to just show you her circumstances, but to show you how she thinks and the process she went through to arrive at that thinking process. When you note (entirely reasonably!) that "I don't see why her love troubles would lead to her deciding murdering the entire family is a good idea", there's two things to question: the specific extent of her 'love trials', which others have been trying to hint you towards, and also the question of what, frankly, 'murder' and 'death' have come to mean to Yasu. The recurring themes of Umineko are all laid out very deliberately; think about how the setting/conceit of the island has ALWAYS been framed as a 'catbox'. Where when there is no proof of anything, no possibility can be denied, and all possibilities can exist at once. This catbox could only exist because everything on the island was erased, and no witnesses survived to explain what really happened. This is emphasized even beyond Yasu in the Episode 7 Tea Party, where Kyrie and Eva are discussing it--where they both announce that they intend to make use of the 'catbox' created by the bomb to push forward a happy story, that nobody can deny, to cover up a devastating, cruel truth. With what you understand about Yasu, can you understand the appeal of creating that sort of setting to her? How her experiences and the ways she has coped with her life led her to being attracted to that as a 'solution' to her problems with her body and her love interests? Can you reason out what specific truth about her injury and her despair about love would make her think this limbo is better than living on? It's also worth keeping in mind that EP7 took a specific moment with Will and Yasu lamenting the "power" she acquired from solving the epitaph. Yasu was just handed the tools to erase everything and create a perfect catbox with the flip of a switch. Knowing this and living with this every day did nothing to help her mental state, as you can imagine. There's a lot of nuance to her psychology and the lines of her reasoning that led her to the murder roulette. Yasu is a great character! Raelle fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 14:25
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Okay more Umineko chapter 7 live blog: Hmm. I wonder what Yasu-Beatrice's invitation to her world is supposed to represent. Is it that Shannon as a personality would be subservient to Beatrice? Or, on a much darker note, is Shannon IRL considering suicide? Or is it more just meant to represent more general tensions between the personalities? Edit: Okay, given the rest of "A new Element," I'm guessing it was just set up for Yasu-Beatrice to realize that she was missing "love" from her world MegaZeroX fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 01:35
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Are you suggesting that because technically the scene is described by Battler, who is not the detective, that despite Erika's presence this is not a scene in which the detective proclamation holds? That would be pretty lame if that's the case, because there are lots of scenes where the narrator isn't clearly stated and the writing vacillates wildly between third and first person, and omniscient narration. (I wonder to what extent this is a translation artifact.) This is borderline giving some of game 5 away but consider (regarding the meta) who is "running" game 5 versus the first four games? and the fact that the GM for game 5 is "unfair" (the "actual" game 5 solution which is fun to figure through, but isn't really that important in the overall narrative is utterly convoluted) should raise the question of why Beatrice was being "fair" in the first place Hyper Crab Tank posted:edit: And a small, insignificant note: Wow, poor Gohda, huh. At first he seemed like kind of a self-serving prick, but in the end, is he the only one on the island with no responsibility for what happened and no significant personal problems? Poor man just wanted to cook good food for people and be acknowledged for it. Truly he is the only pure one in this drama. Severe spoilers in general, don't read etc etc One of my favorite things was finding out that Gohda was one of the "accomplices" in game 2. He does an extremely bad job at it, I think every one of his "Yeah, Kanon totally came back to life!!!!" lines is actually given with his "nervous laughter" sprite. Needless to say I did not figure this out at the time Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 14:43
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Feels Villeneuve posted:Severe spoilers in general, don't read etc etc
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Sep 17, 2020 16:08
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